TIL my anvil was sitting on a rotten stump for 2 years

I moved my anvil to a new spot in the shop last weekend and found the oak stump I had it on was completely rotten underneath - I could poke my finger through the base. That explains why my hammer strikes always felt a little dead and I kept getting weird rebound compared to the other smiths at the guild meetups. Has anyone else had a setup issue like this sneak up on them over time?

2 comments

2 Comments

jessica_robinson2312d ago

It's crazy how stuff like that creeps up on you. You just assume the foundation is solid because it looks fine on the outside, but underneath everything is crumbling. I've noticed that with a lot of things in my own life, not just tools. Like, you'll have a shelf that's been holding books for years and it seems fine, but one day you bump it and it just collapses because the brackets were rusting from the inside out. Or a car that starts making a weird noise and you figure it's just a quirk, but it turns out the whole exhaust system is about to fall off. We get so used to something working that we stop checking the parts we can't see. It's a good reminder to actually look under the hood once in a while, even if everything looks okay on the surface.

val94911d ago

Yeah, I used to be one of those "if it ain't broke don't fix it" people. Thought I was saving time and money by not worrying about stuff that seemed fine. But after a water pipe burst in my basement wall last winter, I totally get what you're saying. A small check would have saved me a ton of headache.